don't know much about biology...
Tonight Dustan and I had dinner at a friend's home in Gloucester, about 30 minutes away and to get there we drove up the Colonial Parkway by the York River and then over the Coleman Bridge. It's a glorious drive. These friends are in their mid-to-late twenties and have their first child, about 6 months old. Michelle made us this amazing dinner - a salad with walnuts and feta and vinagrette, couscous with cranberries and chives, pork and caramelized pears and to top it off - a homemade raspberry pie with french roast coffee (she'd picked the berries this morning outside her house). Their home is very small but new and clean and yummy-smelling with warm bright colors on the wall and the bathroom smelled like the inside of a Yankee Candle. Michelle is also quite brilliant. She went to William and Mary and came out with a fabulous GPA, a biology major with tan beautiful hands and thick brown hair and lots of common sense. They want four children and she wants to stay at home and raise them. She told me she's never been a person that sees herself as a career woman or a person that really fits in the workforce. When she got pregnant with Everett she said she was totally relieved that now she could just be at home with him.
I used to be the same way. I've had only a few jobs in my lifetime, and none of them have inspired a true sense of contributing to society. In fact none of them could ever top staying at home, cleaning my house, re-reading old journals, pushing my cuticles back .... you get the picture. But now! Now, I have an awesome job. And I'm literally, honestly excited to get there on Monday morning after a weekend off. It's a tremendous blessing. You know how you hear parents say their children are gifts from God and when they say it their eyes kind of glaze over? I feel that way about my job. It's not something I take lightly, and I don't feel willing to let go of it easily. We'll see how it all works out when it comes to children and childcare. The real thing I'm getting at here is that Michelle has such a tremendous amount to offer society. We both see public school as a mission field and the perfect dark place to let the light of a household following Jesus shine. I'm sure she'll be a fabulous mom. Her kids will eat whole-wheat waffles with homemade maple syrup, be at the busstop 5 minutes early, win all the science fairs. But what could Michelle offer in the workforce?
I voiced this on the way home to Dustan. I have all these amazing women friends. Their parents have instilled in them fortitude and character and paid the big bucks to send them to the finest institutions of higher learning. They come out, get married - and stay at home with their kids. It's kind of confusing to me. Dustan made some excellent points.
1) Plato, the Founding Fathers, Socrates (to name a few philosophers) never saw education as means to an end i.e. a job. They considered education to serve the purpose of cultivating educated voters with an increased quality of life. If you wanted to get a job, you became an apprentice. But education was something entirely different. It was so that you did just what Michelle wants to do. Be a more contented, aware, capable, informed and opinionated individual with all the tools necessary to flourish in the family and produce more like oneself.
I think that's very interesting. It makes sense to me.
2) No stay-at-home mom should be called a stay-at-home mom. To me, and most, I think, it implies that you're always at home. When in reality, a key quality of a truly successful and *sane* homemaker, by the standards of Proverbs 31, my mom, and most homemakers I know, is that she has her hands in all sorts of projects outside the home.
It's a great night for me. It sets me free the whole thing about education. It doesn't erase the responsibility I feel we have as being college educated in a free world (a very low percentile of people in this universe) but it does open up the options and let them breathe. Now I wonder: is it possible to have an organic garden, perpetually clean sheets, a load of kids, a role in business ventures, your own card-making business, crumb-free carseats, obedient pets, stimulating friendships and time to eat bon-bons and watch the soaps?
posted by betsy @ 9:59 PM
6 comments
